Monday, 19 February, 2001 A new report says China has stepped up the practice of imprisoning dissidents in psychiatric hospitals to deal with the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual group. The report in the American publication, the Columbia Journal of Asian Law, says around 100 known Falun Gong followers have been detained in psychiatric institutions in the past 18 months, and it's believed there are several hundred similar cases. The author, Robin Munro said this marks a sharp increase in the use of psychiatric detention which sidesteps the need for legal procedures and can be used to hold people indefinitely. Mr Munro says China has used high-security psychiatric hospitals extensively as a means of suppressing dissent since the 1950s, in a practice copied from the Soviet Union. A group of doctors has begun a global campaign to condemn psychiatric abuses in China.